Fart noise

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

wow so many old time posters in this thread that are no longer with us. RIP.

He's a career .230 hitter and that's before any expected end of career decline. He's like Adam Dunn. Cub fans called him Babe Ruth. I'd say my projection was a bit closer.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

just admitting you were wrong is really hard, eh?

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Okay. He's better than Matt Stairs. He isn't as good as Babe Ruth. How's that?

Now do you want to take about future Hall of Famers Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, and Javy Baez?

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Oh wow, you DO get it in there's not much difference between the two. A couple above average journeyman with Schwarber having the edge.

Now what about the awful take that he was a generational turd? Monumental bust?

See the difference is you cannot find one post here of me proclaiming those guys were future hall of famers.

But of course you do the subdivision standard of if one person anywhere says something about Cubs player we are all proclaiming it from the mountain tops!

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

There are two sets of baseball conclaves that live in a vacuum, a bubble, and they are the Red Sox and the Cubs. I believe this is a solid observation on my part and I've had it as it pertains to the Cubs, as long as I can remember. I've thought about why this is and the only thing I can come up with is the ballparks. Somehow the cathedral atmosphere, the objectively true beautiful confinement, has turned the fan base inward. When you own the Taj Mahal, everything in the Taj Mahal is better. My ballpark is a dog. My former ballpark was a dog. I go to watch baseball. The difference between me and a cub fan is my corpuscles have 2 seams, yours has ivy.

It's more good old New England insularity for the Red Sox. Wrigley is beautiful but Fenway isn't. Fenway is just old. Wrigley has the ivy, the scoreboard, the bleachers, the Waveland and Sheffield buildings. Fenway has a wall that is larger than other walls.

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When everyone had an old park those were considered the two worst ones. It's ironic that they're the last two standing.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Gonna have to put a year on that "when," because the Tribune put a modicum of care into Wrigley Field while Reinsdorf intentionally let Old Comiskey go to shit so he could move to Carol Stream or whatever. Tiger Stadium got pretty dumpy by the end too.

Kauffman Stadium never gets enough love as a Beautiful Baseball Cathedral. Ever since they ripped out the astroturf, it's been gorgeous.

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The "when" is when they were all just places where teams played ball rather than fetishized "cathedrals" full of fake memories of "smelling the grass."

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

And you base this on what?

CH you are right,

Kauffman is a beautiful place to watch a game.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

JORR was sure wrong about the guy the Cubs got rid of.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Ambiance is fun for about twenty minutes. After that, I want comfort and convenience. I have no use for Wrigley or Fenway.

That in no way answered the question that I asked. But thanks for your opinion. I am shocked that a White Sox fan has that opinion.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Fenway and Wrigley were not two of the worst older parks, but like all of the older parks, they're no longer a great place to watch a game. If Old Comiskey were still standing, I would think the same thing about it.

You like Kauffman Stadium, that tells me you value some modern conveniances.

I do not have an issue with the points you are making. I just want to know what JORR bases his opinion that they were the worst two in their day. He is doing like what USA does in the Bears threads. Just throwing shit against a wall and acting like it is a fact that all of us should recognize.

I love watching a game at Wrigley. I get it does not have the modern conveniences like other parks, but I enjoy watching baseball there. I have not had the privilege of watching a game at Fenway, but I am sure it would be cool as well. I love watching a game at Kaufman as well, but it really isn't because of anything modern, I just think it is a really beautiful park. I would like to see a game at Pittsburgh too because it appears to have that same type of feel. I do not enjoy watching at game at Busch Stadium in St Louis. It just comes off blah to me. And it is not just because of all the awful Cardinal fans around

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Because I lived in the era and I know how they were regarded. I'm glad you love Wrigley Field, but no one was calling it a "cathedral" in 1975.

The fascination with the places teams play is relatively new. I'm sure the all purpose cookie cutters of the 70s set the stage for that. And then Camden Yards ushered in the retro craze.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

So in other words you have nothing to base this on, it is purely your opinion.

Get that weak shit out of here

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Of course it's my opinion. But it's an opinion that is better than the opinion of someone who wasn't around when most teams played in old parks.

The weak shit is insisting on something you couldn't know. But why don't you try to Google up some articles from the 60s that talk about Wrigley and Fenway the way people do now?

I can tell you that old Comiskey was considered the "Baseball Palace of the World" when Wrigley was considered a little dump.

And there are so many manufactured memories and so much bullshit romanticization.

I'm not telling you not to enjoy games at Wrigley Field. I enjoy games there myself. But i am telling you the only thing that makes those two parks "special" is the fact that Crosley, Forbes, Ebbets etc. no longer exist.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

We are all welcome to our opinion.

The weak shit is your acting like you could know it was the opinion of the entire baseball world during that time.

I have no clue what people thought back in those days, and I am not going to claim that I do.

But I feel pretty confident that ballparks in two of the biggest and best cities in the nation were not regarded as the consensus two worst of that time frame. I would also add old Comiskey to this as well. I am sure it was not viewed in a bad light as well.

I actually really liked Old Comiskey. First MLB was seen there.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

John McDonough had been milking the Wrigley mystique for years before the Red Sox really figured out how to do the same thing with Fenway. The Yawkey trust was all set to tear it down in the late '90s and build a New Comiskey-style replica before people complained (also, I think it was supposed to be a complex with the Patriots and they, as usual, flaked out). That's not all to say that it was a poorly regarded dump until 2002 or anything like that, but they were not Creatively Expanding Revenue Streams, either. They didn't have seats on the Green Monster or do the little mini-street fests on Yawkey Way. It was just a quirky old ballpark with lots of history.

I have trouble believing that Wrigley and Fenway were ever regarded as the worst parks in the majors when the Kingdome, Metrodome, and Exhibition Stadium existed. If any old stadium was ever regarded as the worst, I'm pretty sure it was Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

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I have to respect what the Cardinals were going for with Busch III, which was to sort of build the platonic ideal of the neo-retro stadiums. It's certainly meant to be of a kind with Camden Yards from the outside, but they played it straight with the field dimensions and didn't invent any wacky situations like most new parks (staring daggers at Houston here). It's a good balance between what are now the established ballpark aesthetics and a no-nonsense approach to the game. It suits them well. Unfortunately, they monumentally botched the entire adjacent development and spent years with a big gravel patch where a "ballpark village" was supposed to be, but I guess ugliness suits St. Louis, too. The biggest flaw is probably that the home plate entrance, which should sort of be the showcase of the whole exterior, is stuck under downtown St. Louis's customary expressway viaducts, so the main gates are along the sides.

It's kind of crazy to remember that so much good urban design that we take for granted now is relatively recent, just like venerating ballparks as green cathedrals. The Gateway Arch was cut off from the rest of St. Louis by an expressway until like five years ago. This was Millennium Park before, well, the millennium:


A piece of real estate as valuable as that was just a parking lot and a train platform and everyone was pretty much fine with it that way. What were people supposed to do? not park their cars?

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I'm talking about before that. Prior to the cookie cutters and domes. When all teams played in old inner city ballparks. I will grant that Cleveland was in the conversation with Wrigley and Fenway as the shittiest.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

I like the latest Busch Stadium. It's a good place to watch a ballgame. What's funny though is that it is pretty much based upon the much maligned new Sox Park albeit with more bells and whistles and retro twists. But the main feature of the park is the wide outfield concourse from which you can watch the game. Completely based on Sox Park.

Petco has a lot of cool stuff, but the thing I dislike about it is that as soon as you hit a concourse you're divorced from the game that's going on outside.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Now that's an opinion. And objectively Boston isn't really big.

But I'm just going to tell you this and you can take my word for it or not. You probably wouldn't have sent your wife and daughter to a game at Wrigley by themselves in 1976.

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General Jim wears Fort Bragg down... to get it!

Thank you. I cannot stand Petco. The concourse is terrible. Citi is the best new design. It is as you describe for Busch and the Rate, in that you can watch the game almost anywhere away from your seat. They have places to put your beer down and just mingle all over the park.

But I absolutely love Wrigley. I am sort of with you on Fenway. But both places always have large crowds, so the atmosphere is fun and then of course all the fun around the parks.

I will be in Detroit for the Friday and Saturday Cubs game. That will take me down to only five cities left to see the Cubs.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

I was thinking the same thing, yeah. It's New Comiskey with a Camden Yards shell. Mostly symmetrical, intended to play neutral.

Now that the ballpark village has finally taken off for St. Louis, I think the Sox should do the same with some of their excess parking. Sure, it'd be artificial, but what's so authentic about an expanse of asphalt? They don't need a new stadium, they just need to make it more of a destination.

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Which 5 do you have left?